As anyone in the B2B technology industry would know, case study is vital in business development and sales.
More than anything else, it’s this piece of marketing collateral that demonstrates a vendor’s “street cred” to the world and proves to potential customers that it has “been there, done that”.
For ready reference, here’s an example of a B2B technology case study.
Traditionally, someone in the vendor’s marketing org develops a case study from the ground up based on the table of content shown above. Then, someone else in the vendor’s account management or delivery org approaches the customer to get approval for the case study. As seasoned account directors and delivery managers would know, this is no mean task. For various reasons, enterprise customers are reluctant to go public with their use of a particular technology or association with a particular vendor or both. Our blog post entitled 3 Ways To Get Approvals For Case Studies From Reluctant Customers can help vendors overcome their reluctance.
Case studies are still developed more-or-less in the traditional way.
But new tactics are emerging and B2B marketers are well advised to leverage them.
Why does @Marketo present its own case study of the use of #Marketo? Won't customer case studies be a lot more credible?…
— GTM360 (@GTM360) October 15, 2012
By now, the term Buyer 2.0 has entered the mainstream in B2B sales and marketing. This buyer – which is almost everyone nowadays – is Internet-savvy and can find a lot of information about vendors online without talking to sales. More on the trend itself and its impact on the role of B2B technology sales can be found in our blog posts Just Because Customers Can Find Their Own Solutions Doesn’t Mean They Will and Ensuring That Buyer 2.0 Contacts *Your* Sales.
Internet works both ways.
Just as buyers can find a lot of information about vendors online, vendors can also find a lot of information about buyers and others online. So far, the primary use of this information has been in business development e.g. Use ASPOs To Improve Cold Call Response Rates, Creating ASPOs To Bolster Cold Call Effectiveness.
But it’s equally possible to put this information to use in case studies.
In this new tactic, the vendor finds favorable mentions of itself in the public domain and converts them into testimonials and case studies (instead of developing them from the ground up and getting customer approval for them the hard way).
There are at least three alternative public domain sources that vendors could tap in this pursuit.
#1. CUSTOMER ANNUAL REPORTS
Ever since technology went mainstream 30-40 years ago, it has been a practice de rigueur for companies to flaunt their technology sophistication. One of the most common ways of doing so is to drop the name of a marquee technology and / or vendor in statutory filings, as Infosys did by mentioning its implementation of SAP ERP in its DRHP when it listed on NASDAQ in 1999.
But this is now happening even for relatively obscure technologies and vendors.
A customer, Anshuman Shrivastava, Director Toptier Energy Services and ex-Banker, recently pointed out to the annual report of a company in which the company takes pride in its newly installed infrastructure management SAAS solution and names the supplier – a relatively-unknown company called Flaxio.
When I last checked, there was no mention of this customer on Flaxio’s website.
#2. CUSTOMER ADS
Recently a bank carried a front page ad in all leading newspapers proudly proclaiming that it had taken its customers’ banking experience to the next level by implementing Finacle core banking software from Infosys.
It’s common for companies to mention names of existing suppliers in their regulatory filings. But this is the first time I've seen a company doing that in an ad. Kudos to Finacle for achieving this unique feat. #UBI # Infosys pic.twitter.com/K36plQqYXH
— Ketharaman Swaminathan (@s_ketharaman) June 3, 2019
In my experience, it is unprecedented for a customer to mention a supplier by name in its ad.
#3. PRINCIPAL CASE STUDIES
Third-party product implementation and support has been a staple of the IT services industry. Accordingly, it has been a standard operating procedure for an IT services company to mention the name of the product principal in its case studies e.g. “Zensar implements Oracle EBS at Acme Company”.
The reverse has started happening of late, where the product principal mentions the implementation partner’s name in its case studies. For example, in its case study entitled Lotte Hotel boosts booking rates by 49% with Google Optimize, Google not only describes how its A/B testing product led to an uplift in conversion rate of online room booking but also credits its implementation partner iProspect for the achievement.
When I last ran a Google Site Search on the iProspect.com website, I found only one mention of Lotto. It was in the bio of an employee in its South Korea office who had worked in the hotel chain’s holding company Lotte Entertainment before joining iProspect. There was no mention of Lotto Hotel. Since Google is always right, we can safely assume that iProspect has not published a case study of its Lotto Hotel engagement.
In all these cases, vendors can feel free to add these companies to their customer lists on their websites and marketing collateral.
Whatever customers have mentioned about the vendors’ products, features and benefits, including quotes, can be conveniently lifted and reproduced as testimonials on their websites and marketing collateral because they have appeared in the public domain.
Vendors can also repurpose the content to case studies. Assuming that they have stayed within the boundary of the material released by customers (and principals) in the public domain, they can publish these case studies without explicit customer (and principal) approvals. (Although they may still seek approval out of courtesy.)
When in doubt, vendors should follow the “Michael Lewis Principle of Case Study”!